Attacks on press freedoms have come thick and fast under Donald Trump’s second tilt at the presidency, whether deporting a visa holder for writing an op-ed criticizing Israel or his various lawsuits against news outlets whose coverage displeased him. But not all of the attacks have come from the Trump administration. In fact, at least one New York case was the office of a Democrat in a blue city that was leading the charge.
Last Friday, a judge dismissed charges against Hudson Valley photojournalist Alexa Wilkinson, who had photographed the New York Times building after it had been defaced by protesters unhappy with the paper’s Gaza coverage last July, then posted the resulting footage later. Despite not damaging any property or taking part in any vandalism themself, Wilkinson (who uses they/them pronouns) was arrested, had their home raided and ransacked, saw thousands of dollars’ worth of their property seized, and faced potentially years in prison after being slapped with the charge of a felony hate crime by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office. Responding to a list of queries from Jacobin, a spokesperson for the DA’s office said that “following a thorough investigation, our office moved to dismiss the case, which a judge ultimately granted,” adding that they could not comment further or provide more information as it was now sealed.
The case had aroused outrage from journalists and First Amendment advocates, who gathered in New York’s Foley Square shortly after Wilkinson’s arrest last year to protest what they called an attack on press freedoms. Particularly ironic was the fact that Bragg had been swept into power five years ago on promises to “hold people in power accountable,” roll back mass incarceration, and “address issues in a non-carceral way.”
Instead, his office spent the past half year trying to put an independent reporter critical of the New York Times in prison.
“This case represented a troubling attempt to criminalize protected expression and to stretch hate crime laws beyond their lawful purpose,” says Terra Brockman, staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Defense Practice, who represented Wilkinson in the case.
“I’m relieved these charges aren’t hanging over me anymore,” Wilkinson says. “But I’m angry that it happened and that it may happen to other people around the country, and in ways that are more violent and aggressive.”
It’s hard to disagree with that when you look at the facts of the case, even as presented by prosecutors and the police in the criminal complaint.
The charge against Wilkinson stemmed from a July 30 vandalism incident that saw a group spray-paint the Times building in midtown Manhattan with the words “NYT LIES; GAZA DIES” and scatter leaflets otherwise accusing the newspaper of complicity in the Gaza genocide. Prosecutors and police later charged that Wilkinson had engaged in a hate crime aimed at several top Times editors of Jewish descent, involving a “communication” they had allegedly made that threatened physical harm to their safety and property.
Yet the evidence was dubious from the start. The complaint did not even allege that Wilkinson had actually taken part in the vandalism but simply that they had been “at the scene of the vandalism, holding a camera.”
“Photographing graffiti, criticizing news coverage, and documenting controversial matters does not by any means constitute a hate crime,” says Molly Biklen, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Beyond this, the basis for the charge appeared to come down to two social media posts Wilkinson made after the incident. One involved Wilkinson embedding two tweets on an Instagram post: the first from writer John Ganz comparing Times columnist Bret Stephens’s insistence that Israel’s war wasn’t a genocide to Holocaust denial; and another that read, “They hanged newspaper editors at Nuremberg,” with Wilkinson name-checking Times executive editor Joseph Kahn and commenting, “Looking at you.”
“I am informed by Informant 1 . . . that [Kahn] is Jewish,” the author of the complaint, New York Police Department (NYPD) detective Matthew Buonaspina, wrote.
The complaint also points to a video Wilkinson posted on their TikTok account containing footage of the vandalism and listing eleven Times employees who it claims had been “exposed.”
“All eleven of the ‘exposed’ New York Times staff are Jewish, except for one,” wrote Buonaspina. The video, he elaborates, details how one of those eleven, Times correspondent Isabel Kershner, has family who served in the Israeli military, specifically her sons and husband, whose pro-Israel think tank she also frequently cites in her journalism.
This is the sum total of the evidence marshaled by the NYPD and Manhattan district attorney to claim Wilkinson had carried out a hate crime against New York Times staff.
“If all the police have to substantiate a hate crime charge is an Instagram post screenshotting ‘They hanged newspaper editors at Nuremberg’ with the caption ‘Looking at you [Joseph Kahn],’ this is flimsy at best,” says Stephanie Jablonsky, senior program counsel for public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “While the First Amendment makes an exception for ‘true threats,’ a true threat is a statement through which ‘the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.’ Political rhetoric doesn’t meet this standard simply because it references violence.”
This didn’t stop the NYPD and Manhattan DA from turning Wilkinson’s life upside down.
One Sunday morning two months after the incident, more than a dozen police officers in riot gear turned up with a search warrant to Wilkinson’s home in Cold Spring, New York, and proceeded to seize virtually every piece of electronic equipment in the house, including their work laptop and photography equipment as well as their clothes — everything from socks and hats to keffiyehs and jerseys emblazoned with the word “Palestine.” They also seized the belongings of Wilkinson’s wife and a friend staying with them that weekend, both of whom provided Jacobin with their own accounts of the raid.
For three hours as the search unfolded, police kept Wilkinson cuffed in the back of a police cruiser where they say they were in so much pain they felt like vomiting. Officers refused to explain where they had taken Wilkinson to their wife (who asked to remain nameless), who sat outside in the cold, listening to officers laughing and joking while ransacking their home.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been more terrified in my life,” she says.
When it was finally over, she went back inside to find their things strewn and the house torn apart as if there had been “an earthquake.” She found their two cats buried under piles of their belongings.
Wilkinson only understood what was happening once officers drove them, still in their pajamas, nearly two hours to the NYPD’s Seventh Precinct, where they overheard one officer tell another they were with the hate crimes unit. There, Wilkinson was for the first time able to get their eyes on an actual search warrant — not because police finally showed them one but because someone they were sharing a cell with who had been arrested as part of the same operation had one in their pocket. Wilkinson was finally released from jail by a judge at 1 a.m.
“They ripped my entire apartment and life apart,” says Wilkinson.
With no camera and their laptops and hard drives gone, Wilkinson was forced to drop thousands of dollars to replace the equipment they relied on to earn a living and nearly lost their job. Five months later, they still have not been given their property back by the NYPD. Their friend — who also had his photography equipment taken, and who was slammed into a wall and had his phone knocked from his hands and seized after trying to film the raid — similarly says the incident was “debilitating” to his photography business.
In the months that followed, Wilkinson says they have had to watch what they say and decline to cover any protests involving the New York Times — even to avoid walking through certain parts of New York due to an order of protection taken out as part of the case. Meanwhile, neither Wilkinson nor their lawyer to this day know who even lodged the complaint against them.
The charge against Wilkinson looks especially thin when put beside other hate crimes recently prosecuted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Last December, for instance, Bragg announced charges — including aggravated harassment in the second degree, the same charge Wilkinson had been hit with — against a man who hospitalized several Asian New Yorkers, in one case calling the victim “a f— Asian.”
That same charge has been used by Bragg in the past year against a man who attacked a fifty-one-year-old Latino man with a metal bike chain while yelling “f— Hispanics” and other racist phrases, and a man who punched a gay Latino couple while yelling homophobic and xenophobic slurs. By contrast, the case against Wilkinson doesn’t accuse them of physically doing anything other than taking photos and video, nor of using anything even approaching this language.
Wilkinson’s case doesn’t even stand up against specifically antisemitic hate crime cases recently brought by Bragg’s office on the same charge. One, from last June, saw a woman attacked on the subway while the attacker called her a “white Jew b—.” Another, from December 2024, involved an attacker who gave his victim a concussion and numerous broken bones, while yelling antisemitic slurs and phrases like, “Kill the Jews” and “Gas the k—kes.” In one particularly high-profile case, a mentally ill man threatened a prominent Manhattan synagogue, after posting online that he was the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, that “the Jews killed me in my past life,” and that he would “kill tenfold as many Jews as [Hitler] did in WW2.”
The NYPD and Bragg’s office appear to be arguing that social media posts criticizing New York Times editors for their foreign policy coverage is equivalent to hospitalizing random people while yelling racial slurs.
Ironically, Buonaspina, the NYPD detective who authored the complaint, has himself had several allegations lodged against him with New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). That includes a successful complaint in 2012, which resulted in a $12,000 settlement with the city and Buonaspina losing five vacation days in an official reprimand. That incident saw Buonaspina detain a black motorist and, according to the motorist himself, act in a threatening way toward him, before conducting an illegal search of his car.
Records show Buonaspina had one other allegation against him that was substantiated by the CCRB over improperly frisking a forty-two-year-old black man two years earlier, though it did not result in any disciplinary action owing to the statute of limitations expiring. Jacobin is still waiting on a request for details on the case, which are not publicly available.
A journalist arrested for doing their job, intimidation of dissent by the state, the abuse of hate crime laws, the stretching of the definition of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel — these things have all become sadly par for the course in Trump’s second term. But the Wilkinson case is one where it wasn’t the president using these tactics but a Democratic officeholder publicly opposed to him.
“I do find it ironic that anyone in the position of running as the opposite of Trump or a fascist regime would then charge a journalist with a hate crime for a social media post,” says Wilkinson.
But Wilkinson’s case is not unique. One year earlier, with a Democrat still in the White House, independent photojournalist Samuel Seligson, himself Jewish, found himself arrested by the NYPD and similarly hit with hate crime charges for filming the vandalism of the homes of four leaders of the Brooklyn Museum over its financial ties to Israel, another case in which the journalist was not accused of engaging in property damage but simply documenting it. That case, widely condemned by press freedom groups, was also dropped late last year.
Even as the US public, and certainly the people of New York, have become increasingly critical of Israel and US policy toward it, such views can still apparently be grounds for your arrest, the destruction of your livelihood, and the threat of prison, in the bluest city in one of the country’s bluest states. And it seems they can be lobbed against anyone no matter their background.
“My family is Jewish,” says Wilkinson. “My sister is Jewish, my nephew is Jewish, my brother-in-law is Jewish, I work for Jewish orgs. I grew up with the Jewish religion around me. That’s why I felt like this was so personally offensive.”
Great Job Branko Marcetic & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
